How to debug why can't select NVidia card? (Cycles renderer/CUDA support)
Cycles render should be available independently of which compute device is chosen, if no compatible graphics card is present it still runs regularly with the CPU.

If the Cycles render engine is not showing up it's probably because it's addon is disabled. Try Enabling it under Blender User Preferences > Add-ons > Search for Cycles.

As for using the NVidia card, right above the computing device pull down menu there should be two buttons that say None and Cuda you have to enable Cuda before Blender is able to recognize your graphics card as a computing device, I think.

Edit: Upon closer inspection of your screenshot, the CUDA button is not visible, so Blender is considering no compute capabilities are present at the moment.

You mentioned a laptop with two cards. Many of these systems use a low power (Intel) graphics card for battery saving and the High powered one for graphics heavy applications. There is usually some sort of switching system and profile manager for this sort of setting. Try activating the High performance profile or making the NVidia card the active one before running Blender, so that CUDA capabilities are present when the application starts.